Babylon South. Jon Cleary
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JON CLEARY
Babylon South
FOR CATE
Contents
On Monday March 28, 1966, Sir Walter Springfellow, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, left his home in Mosman in the city of Sydney to return to Melbourne and the then headquarters of ASIO. An ex-Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, he had been Director-General of Security for only a year. It was his habit to fly up from Melbourne each Friday evening, spend the weekend with his wife and return to Melbourne on the 8 a.m. Monday flight of TAA. A Commonwealth car picked him up at his home this Monday morning, as it usually did, and delivered him to Kingsford Smith Airport at Mascot at 7.45. He got out of the car, said his usual courteous thank you to the driver, walked into the terminal and was never heard of again.
It had been a stormy weekend, though not, according to his wife, in the Springfellow home. A huge storm had blown up along the New South Wales coast and there had been considerable damage north of Sydney; the sea had been such that big swells had rolled into Sydney Harbour and for the first time surfies had ridden their boards down Middle Harbour. The storm, however, had not got beyond the Blue Mountains fifty miles west of the city and out on the plains there were cloudless skies and one of the worst droughts in twenty years. Down in Melbourne there had been an ugly demonstration against the sending of draftees to Vietnam and the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, had suffered a barrage of eggs and tomatoes, something a little softer than the draftees would have to face. The report on the demonstration and photographs of the egg and tomato bombardiers were waiting on the Director-General’s desk for him. He would have smiled at such criminal acts, but only to himself.
He was fifty years old, handsome, came of a wealthy established family and had made a considerable reputation as a Queen’s Counsel before being appointed a judge five years before. His appointment as Director-General had been welcomed by both major political parties, but the public were not invited to comment: national security was thought, in those days, too esoteric for public intelligence to comprehend. Sir Walter, who had been knighted just before his appointment, was considered by his own organization to have no enemies except, of course, the hundreds of criminals he had prosecuted or sentenced and the countless foreigners, traitors and activists his organization was seeking.
He had been married for two years to a beautiful wife, twenty-five years his junior, and it seemed that he lived in the best of all possible worlds. Though, naturally, he did not boast of that during his five days a week in Melbourne, a city which thought it was the best of all possible worlds.
‘We were perfectly happy,’ said Lady Springfellow. ‘He must have been kidnapped or something. I just can’t believe what’s happened. When he took this job he warned me there might sometimes be trouble. But this … !’
The Commonwealth Police, who were in charge of airport security, had called in the New South Wales Police after consultation with ASIO. Scobie Malone was then a 21-year-old constable on temporary duty with the Missing Persons Bureau. Sergeant Harry Danforth, who couldn’t trace a missing bull in a cattle chute, was in charge of the Bureau, but his men found that no handicap; a lazy man, he left them to their instinctive guesses and hunches. Missing persons usually leave fewer clues than murderers and the police assigned to trace them more often than not have to rely on guesswork. There were dozens of hunches as to the reason for the disappearance of Sir Walter Springfellow, but none of them led anywhere.
‘It is some activist group,’ said one of the two men ASIO had sent up from Melbourne. They were ex-Army Intelligence, middle-aged and military, and it was obvious they didn’t have much time for the two younger men, recent university graduates, who represented ASIO’s Sydney office. From where they sat the earth was flat, easily interpreted. ‘We’ll get some outlandish demand pretty soon.’
The Commonwealth Police inspector shrugged. He, too, was middle-aged, with a countryman’s face, gullied and sun-blotched. He had transferred from a bush division of one of the State forces and sometimes he longed for those other, placid days. ‘Could be. But three days have gone by and there’s been nothing. They usually try to grab their publicity while everything’s still on the front page. They’re like politicians.’ All the older men nodded: they had a common disrespect for politicians. Only Malone, who had never met one, kept his head still. ‘What’s your opinion on this, Bill?’
Senior Detective-Sergeant Zanuch, of the NSW Police Special Branch, had been seconded to this case by one of the Assistant Commissioners. Ordinary voters who disappeared could be left to a lazy sergeant and a few junior constables in Missing Persons; a senior public servant, a knight and an ex-judge at that,